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LONDON — Ian Chan doesn't know where he would have wound up if he hadn't become a quadriplegic in a motorcycle crash at age 15. But it might not have been a good place.

He was a rebellious kid, hung with a bit of a bad crowd and didn't have much of a focus.

But really, what kid does at that age? For many, it's all about challenging authority and having fun, finding the next party.

That's where Chan, a Richmond kid, was headed the night before a Vancouver Molson Indy race 20 years ago.

“My friend pulled up on a motorcycle and had an extra helmet. He'd already been giving some other friends joy rides up and down Steveston Highway.

“I had a choice to jump on [his] bike or get on a bus to head downtown to an underage dance. It was 'Oh, I don't want to ride a bus when I can get on a bike.' I jumped on, there was an accident and the rest is history.”

Chan doesn't remember the violent crash, but the skid marks on the road leading to one of those concrete barriers that held the fencing for the race indicated the pair were going at a high rate of speed.

The friend escaped with a broken ankle. Chan was left an incomplete quadriplegic with limited hand and wrist function.

“I was probably not headed in the right direction [in life], so the accident was a bit of a blessing in disguise,” he says.

A couple of years after the accident, after trying track and tennis for those with a disability, he gravitated towards wheelchair rugby, the fast-paced, bruising game that finally takes to the Paralympic stage beginning Wednesday. Now 35 and a co-captain of the national team, Chan is a top goal scorer in the international game that features such violent crashes in specially reinforced chairs that it was initially dubbed Murderball.

It took some coaxing to sell him on making a full commitment. “The coach was a d---, he road me hard,” he says, adding that he was still trying to find himself and hold onto to parts of his old life.

But when he did commit, he quickly became a dynamic presence on Team Canada.

“It may sound like a cliché, but I truly believe my life is better because of my accident,” says Chan while sitting on a patio of the Athlete's Village on a warm London afternoon.. “I don't live a life of regret or anything, because I wouldn't have met the people that I've met.

“I wouldn't have had the life experiences I've had … travelled and seen the world like I have. I feel like my life is so rich with life experience, I couldn't trade that for anything else.”

That does often sound like a cliché and so rehearsed coming from an athlete with a disability, but there is something genuine about the, polite, soft-spoken Chan that makes it believable.

He admits it sounds “strange” to hear himself say he wouldn't take anything back, though he concedes that wasn't the feeling in the immediate weeks after the crash.

“I would have never thought that when I was laying in the hospital bed, being fed out of tubes and can't even get out of bed without puking. That was a tough part of my life.

“But the body is an amazing piece of machinery. I tend to block out a lot of those painful moments in those early years and now I just focus on the good things.”

Chan is in his fourth Paralympics, having been part of a silver medal-winning team in 2004. Canada took home bronze in 2008 and the team believes that if things break the right way, a first ever Paralympic gold is possible in London.

“It's the one thing missing on my mantle,” says Chan, who was part of Canada's world championship gold in 2002. “There's definitely a fire to reach for that goal, the one thing we've been working so hard for for the last four years. I'm hungry. I've dreamed of it since my first Paralympics in Sydney.

“It hurts to think of how close we've come.”

The Canadians lost to the powerful U.S. 55-53 in the final of the Canada Cup at Richmond Olympic Oval in July in a tournament that featured the same eight countries competing at London. The Americans are the two-time reigning Paralympic champions, but there is great parity.

Chan won't say how long he'll continue to play, but says he's passionate enough about the game that he does see himself staying in it as either a coach or administrator

“Wheelchair rugby is definitely part of my identity. That's who I am as an athlete. It gave me the opportunity to find myself, share my life with so many people in the same boat as me. That's really helped mold me as a man and shaped my character.”

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